A WORLD OF TALENT

Next month, designer Kim Wooster is moving from New York City to
the Koh Samui Islands off the coast of Thailand. She's not simply
another stressed-out New Yorker ditching it all for a simpler life;
as a sought-after book-jacket designer, she will continue to
produce lovely, elegant and witty designs for works of fiction sold
in downtown bookshops. She'll just do it from 10,000 miles
away.

Kim is a manifestation of our rapidly dematerializing economy,
one in which design, creativity and entertainment, rather than
production and manufacturing, play a starring role. And, just like
Kim, as the world's creative workforce begins to realize that it
can work from anywhere, it will increasingly situate itself as
close to the Edens of the world as possible. In the process, it
will remake those places, and our own.

That's what's happening in Wellington, New Zealand, where The
Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed. It wasn't long after
their project got started that Peter Jackson and the films'
producers realized that, rather than rely on Hollywood, they could
just as easily build a cutting-edge studio right on site. Banks of
computers used to render the film's special effects could equally
well reside on the back streets of Bangalore as they could in
northern California. The elite talent used to envision the films,
however, drew from across the globe by the chance to work with each
other and in paradise.

New Zealand was transformed from a tiny country known for having
more sheep than people to a global creative powerhouse. Place names
from the Rings trilogy dot the national map, so you can pop
over to Middle Earth on your way back from the regional center of
Christchurch.

In industry after industry, a similar story has been playing
out, and it has very deep roots. At the beginning of the 20th
century, our economy was driven largely by the production and
distribution of very tangible commodities, such as steel, coal and
electricity. In the first half of the 20th century, we moved
rapidly into a product-driven economy, inventing literally
thousands of new categories of consumer goods. In the second half
of the century, we shifted to a largely service-based economy. Now,
at the beginning of this century, we find ourselves on the verge of
another shift to an economy defined by creative output. Our economy
has become increasingly intangible, and workers less connected to
specific places. Global creatives, who're at the vanguard of this
trend, are more mobile, and increasingly denationalized.

At each new phase of our economy, we found elements of the
preceding arrangement outsourced. It was when, and because, other
nations (such as Venezuela and Mexico) began to produce commodities
in quantity that we entered the product economy. It was when, and
because, others (such as China and Korea) began to manufacture
products in quantity that we entered the service economy. That
we're now concerned with the outsourcing of low-end service jobs to
Indian call centers is evidence, not of calamity, but that the
economy is shifting again.

The next economic phase will impact every part of our lives,
from the kinds of work we do (and want to do) to the way in which
we educate our citizens and train our workers. Unfortunately, our
educational system still largely prepares children to live and work
in a commodity- or product-driven economy that hasn't existed for
half a century. Working on an assembly line 80 years ago,
creativity might have been a liability; in tomorrow's economy,
invention and innovation will be paragon skills. Most of us won't
know, or care, how to do long division. That's what Google is
for.

It's also quite likely that we'll see more rural urbanites
creative workers who choose to live in far-flung locales, or who
temporarily cluster into creative nodes and then disperse a few
weeks or months later. Communities of all sorts will need to figure
out how to speak to, attract and retain their share of this
high-margin global talent pool one that comes from around the
world, not just from within the U.S. And they'll be competing not
just with other communities down the road, but with islands off the
coast of Thailand, cafs in the bohemian quarters of Prague, and the
lands of Middle Earth.